Enhanced services telephone systems such as prepaid calling systems are well known. Subscribers in such systems are provided with a calling card containing a personal identification number ("PIN") by which the amount of telephone usage remaining on the card can be determined by the subscriber at the time the call is placed.
In known prepaid telephone systems, there are a number of work stations to assist the service provider in performing the various functions needed for the operation of the system. These functions include (a) the administration of the subscriber database which controls call utilization, (b) the interface with the customer regarding the balance in the subscriber's account, the status of the account and recharging of prepaid cards by a subscriber, (c) the live operators who assist in the placing of the calls, and (d) system administration which often spans multiple servers and even multiple locations.
Heretofore, to modify these functions or to add new functions to the prepaid system required the loading of new software or the rewriting of the existing code. Clearly the time and expense of implementing the change impacted the ability of such systems to respond to growth in the system, the changing needs of subscribers, etc.
The present invention addresses these problems by providing a method of altering the functionality within a system by modifying the data instead of code.
Additionally, the configuration of each of the high level functions may be selectively customized by means of a user configurable table, in which the settings used to reconfigure the software are recorded as data thus obviating the necessity to load an additional program and/or rewriting code.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a novel method and system which obviates many of the problems of known telephone systems with great financial and temporal savings.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a novel method and system which permits a single computer software program to be used for all workstations in the system.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a novel method and system which permits the computer software program to be modified by business analysts rather than engineers or other technicians, all without the necessity to modify the software program.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a novel software program that reduces retraining requirements by using a single program having a basically consistent user interface to implement database changes for all functions.
It is yet a further object of the present invention to provide a novel method and system which reduces system ownership costs due to the multiple functions which can be performed on a single workstation.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a novel system and method to allow the customer to add functions to the system in such a way that these functions appear well integrated in the user interface.
These and many other objects and advantages of the present invention will be readily apparent to one skilled in the art to which the invention pertains from a perusal of the claims, the appended drawings, and the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments.